John Piper says Christianity is a “masculine” faith, as I’ve pointed out in last week’s blog posts, and what of it?
I mean, if a French boulangerie owner says Christianity is a religion of bread — a baker’s religion — we might raise an eyebrow, acknowledge that, yes, bread is not only a simile Jesus used to describe himself, as well as part of our Eucharist. But we would look askance at someone who elevated the baker’s role in the formation of and faithful living out of Christianity, particularly if both our Scriptures and Church history testified to the preciousness, the Spirit-giftedness, and the contributions of other laborers from other fields. And we would challenge, publicly and firmly, any theology that elevates one profession over another and, in doing so, effectively subjugates those in those other professions who have been – and are now – liberated by the mighty work of Christ. The baker’s declaration that Christianity is “that of his own type” would not surprisingly lead to the shutting out of non-bakers from Church service, if the bakers’ beliefs were dominant in the Christian culture, and it would be an egregious application of a mistaken theology indeed if those bakers misused their power to deny full participation in the Body of believers to those who are not, for whatever reason, bread bakers.
Bread-baking, of course, is not an ontological characteristic. While a baker-dominant theology would be in error, anyone who wanted to exercise the gifts the Holy Spirit gave them in the Church could choose to apply herself to the craft and profession of baking and thus enable themselves to enter into the ranks of leadership to which they feel called and to which their gifts attest – again, not because they’re bakers by profession, but, in this baker-centered Church, they’re gifted not only in the crafting of bread through study and experience, but for Christian service by the Holy Spirit. In other words, no matter how unfair or un-Biblical the theology that bars non-bakers from service, one’s “non-baking status” can be changed; it’s not ontological.
No one, of course, actually calls for the recognition and practice of Christianity as a bakers’, plumbers’, English Lit majors’, or competitive archers’ faith. Only the most bigoted backwaters of faux-Christianity take ontological characteristics other than gender as unequal categories of service, gifting, and participation. There are “Christian” churches, Christian in name only, who continue to claim that Black people are subhuman, and we can infer that those judged to be subhuman are simultaneously judged to be unable to serve their Creator in leadership roles in the congregation. Other so-called Christ-worshiping churches might disallow Jews or poor people in the pulpit, at the elders’ board, or in the diaconate. And, God be praised, most of us would find that objectionable for two reasons: we’d find it un-Biblical, and we’d find it nauseating. We understand, most of us, that the Church can never discriminate against or subjugate its own sisters and brothers on the basis of ontologocial characteristics. Even if they’re Cretans, whom the Apostle Paul assures us are thugs, bores, and utter, ineffable doofuses. The Spirit-gifted believer from the Isle of Crete is free to serve in even the most conservative of “Bible-believing” churches, for which we’re all undoubtedly glad.
That’s if our Cretan believer is our brother – not our sister. Because if our Christian sister, whether she’s a baker, Cretan, Baptist, seminary graduate, or the most obviously, lovingly Spirit-gifted woman any in her congregation have ever seen, she cannot, in most Christian churches, serve in leadership, teach men or mixed groups, or preach from the pulpit. Further, she’s told that whatever her talents, her “role and function” as a woman require her to be a follower, never a leader, in society and in the home as well, and this simply because she’s a woman. The complementarians will assure us that she and her sisters are ontologically equal to their brethren, no less loved by God nor saved by his Son. They do insist that the Lord’s Spirit cannot gift them equally – as pastors, preachers, leaders – and yet are comfortable in assigning different roles to equally-created believers, roles that correspond with utter and unshakeable consistency. The male role is one of leadership, always, and authority forever; the female role is one of follower, always, and subjugation forever. And while it seems illogical to argue that persons of equal ontology must rightly always take consistent roles that are unequal, based solely on that ontological characteristic, that is, indeed, what complementarians glean from the Scriptures. I disagree with them, and I can’t attend a complementarian church, but I don’t hesitate to acknowledge that they’re true believers, men and women I won’t refuse fellowship with, however strenuously I believe them to be in grave error.
But when Piper, Mark Driscoll, and Doug Wilson all claim that Christianity is inherently masculine, or that Jesus’ masculinity is at the root of the Gospel message, or that the biggest spiritual and emotional problem most people have is “father hunger,” they remove themselves from the mainstream of even the most fervent complementarians and become, instead, messengers of a Gospel entirely foreign to that of Christ’s and entirely out of place in any Christian church, although quite compatible with the silliest men’s lodges, private “dining clubs,” and perhaps treehouses, although I have some innate respect for boys who build forts and such to get away from GIRLS. They’re still humble, after all, and bend appropriately to their mothers’ and teachers’ authority, something these men would not do.
What they do is exult in the privileges of their masculinity and use a simplistic, wooden, literalist interpretation of Scripture to justify it. I applaud the taking seriously of difficult texts; what I see here is an inconsistent devotion to “taking the Bible literally” that is curiously – or not – absent in discussions of wealth and possessions, pacifism, and even the Pauline indictment of the character of those annoying Cretans. Theirs is not a hermeneutic of textual inquiry and respect, but one that justifies the privileges they were born into by using a few out-of-context verses from 1 Timothy (with its near-impossible understanding of the Greek “authentein”), 1 Corinthians, and 1 Peter, while ignoring clearer and more numerous testimonies in Scripture to the Gospel-charged abolishment of privilege and favored distinctions based on race, sex, and social class. When they preach on marriage, they cling to two verses in Ephesians 5 rather than the entirety of, for example, First Corinthians, which offers a seven-point call for marital equality, not a call for unilateral female submission – and even in Ephesians 5, they disdain a hermeneutic that would call for unilateral, unreciprocated male love toward a wife, and ignore the context-setting presence of v. 21, which calls for mutual submission. They proclaim that the original sin of Eden was Adam’s abrogation of headship, not his and Eve’s defiance of God in taking the fruit. In the same way that the Church has regrettably clung for the past century to a hermeneutic that confirms its cultural, social, and political presuppositions and preferences, these men and their followers profess a devotion to the Word astonishingly bereft of a Christ-centered, Spirit-guided approach to it. Such is the case, I believe, with all complementarians – but Wilson, Piper, and Driscoll, et al, go a step further, exulting in masculinity rather than submitting to the clear message of equality in texts like Galatians 3:28, which clearly echoes what the New Testament has been telling us all along: There are only two types of people in the world of the first century in which it was written – those who believe in Christ Jesus unto salvation for the forgiveness of their sins, and those who don’t. These mens’ insistence on foisting additional demographic, ontological divisors on the Church and the world around them would be – should be – a meaningless exercise in self-promotion and arrogance, except that they attract huge followings that give them influence far beyond what they deserve.
It must annoy the testosterone out of them that 1 Timothy promises redemption not in “the biological male, Christ Jesus,” but in “Christ Jesus, the human one,” and that the God-made-human author of our salvation accorded women unheard of and unprecedented freedom and autonomy in his service. That openness to the inclusion of the sociological “Other” caused scandal then, resulting in some of Paul’s time- and circumstance-bound prohibitions against specific instances of female leadership for a time, and the continued shutting doors of inclusion to women causes scandal, in the form of a rejection of the Gospel, among non-Christians today. Indeed, the transformative possibility of a Gospel message to a lost world is crippled by a Church determined to deny women and men the freedom promised in Christ, and it’s rendered offensive to those in the world not because of their sinfulness, but because it’s seen as it too often is – an apologetic for the injustice, unrighteousness, and oppression that has chained and battered millions and millions of women throughout history. We dare not change the message to accommodate culture, but we cannot continue to befoul the message we offer and blame the pollution on those harmed by the error we proclaim.
I’ll close this paean to egalitarianism in Christ – this attack on the Piper/Driscoll/Wilsonian insistence on a “masculine” faith authored by a Savior whose biological maleness is the fulcrum upon which his message rests by reminding my readers of my dear sister in Christ, Lupita Rocha Q., who pastors a small church in the most dangerous city in the world, Ciudad Juarez, in north Mexico. While Driscoll defends his petulant, snotty reaction to his wife’s “mom-haircut,” Wilson touts “father-hunger” as the primary psychosocial disease of our world and Piper brings us a manly Christ and his masculine faith-movement, and do so to adulation and riches, with risk of nothing more, at least temporally, than the stinging rebuke of a housewife in Moscow, Idaho, their sister Lupita risks her life every day ministering to former and current drug addicts, gang members, single women abused by patriarchy and the men it employs in its cruel service, and young families who haven’t the luxury of pursuing the classics or the drive to embrace pop culture – who simply pray every night that their kids don’t get shot on the streets. Lupita lives alone most of the time; when I saw her last March, I longed to go with her, because I knew then, and know now, that it’s likely that I won’t see her again. She is a gentle, humble servant, a powerful preacher, a gifted musician, an evangelist of incomparable gifting, and a teacher who would never, as Wilson does with his Federal Vision, confuse the salvation of the individual soul with the covenant membership of his family. Lupita has given her life to Jesus; she recognizes that it’s his to take, and she asks only that she die in his service. She is an Abigail, an Esther, a Junia, Deborah, Phoebe, Dorcas, Miriam – and she’s a Paul, Peter, Stephen, Barnabas, Philip, Matthew and Luke. The Spirit has given her tremendous gifts by nothing more than Divine pleasure and purpose, and it would be a shame for her to die in the service of a faith rich white men have deemed “masculine” for their own pleasure and purpose.
I don’t fault Wilson, Driscoll and Piper for not serving the Lord in Juarez. I fault them for the comfort in which they insistence that our sister and millions like her all over the world and throughout history are giving their lives to a faith defined by one characteristic – masculinity – that cannot possibly legitimate, validate, encourage, or even allow their service. Christ died to set them free from their worldly, unbiblical prejudices, and perhaps they, too, would be transformed by an encounter with Lupita or any other woman living out the gifting of the Holy Spirit in bringing Christ to a broken, lost, confused world.